Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I just need to check: are we writing these questions for the member for Hume? He is asking a question about wages and the cost of living after a decade of deliberate wage suppression and wage stagnation under those opposite. The changes that we are working through, in consultation with employers and with unions and with the broader Australian community, are about seeking more and better agreements and not more conflict. If those opposite had their way, we would have another decade of wages stagnating and ordinary working Australians falling further and further behind. Our efforts at the jobs summit, whether in the area of the minister for industrial relations or in all of the other areas that we have paid such close attention to, are about getting wages moving again in this economy. The defining failure of those opposite—the dregs of the former government which sit before me—is that wages for a decade barely shifted. That meant that ordinary Australian people—

See this speech in context